zyi 




b 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




^^.^^^-^xl^ 



Citizen Soldier. 



The Citizen Soldier 



HIS PART IN WAR AND PEACE. 



■■■/ 

John Clark Ridpath 



THEIR RISING ALL AT ONCE WAS AS THE SOUND 

OF THUNDER HEARD REMOTE." 

—Milton. 



1892 



^ 



m 4 '8- X 






Copyrighted 1892. 
THE JONES BROTHERS PUBLISHING CO. 



THE MEN WHO MADE THE NATION FREE- 
WHO BORE THE FLAG OF GLORY 

THROUGH BATTLE-BLAST TO VICTORY— 
THE UNCROWNED ICINGS OF STORY. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

Amid the commemorative services of this 
day we miay well pause to consider the character and 
deeds of the Citizen Soldier. In the history of the 
world the soldier has performed the largest part. 
From the primitive ages until the present day he has 
been the most powerful single factor among the forces 
which have contributed to the civilization of mankind. 
We have to reflect, in this connection, that the history 
of civilization has been the history of violence. The 
present refinement and progress of the human race 
did not begin in peaceful and beautiful gardens ; in 
happy spots by the river banks ; in flower-decked 
islands where golden apples grow; but in cruel sav- 
agery and the bloody jungles of barbarism. 

Out of such a condition it was impossible for man 
to emerge except by force. In his rudest estate he 
had to make his way by sword and spear and battle- 
axe. Every pathway which he trod had to be hewed, 
not only through the primitive thickets of the ancient 



8 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

wilderness, but through the fiercest opposition of his 
fellowmen. It must be remembered that in the prim- 
eval ages men subsisted on the gifts of the earth. 
They gathered from the trees and water-brooks the 
means of sustaining life. Here was the foundation 
of that dreadful system of competition which to the 
present day holds the world in its cruel grip. It may 
be that in process of time this system of competi- 
tion, which has wrought so great havoc with the peace 
and happiness of mankind, will give place to the more 
generous method of cooperation, under the reign of 
which our fellow beings shall work shoulder to shoul- 
der, instead of striving, as they have always done, 
face to face. 

This is the genesis of the soldier. He appeared in 
the world as an agent for correcting violence with 
other violence more humane. The world was given 
up to force, not to say brutality, and the soldier came 
to make the reign of force more tolerable, the bru- 
tality less brutal. In order to understand his relation 
to the history of the world we must consider that 
history as a long series of slow and toilsome advances 
from the darkness and violence of the beginning to 
the comparative light and reason of a happier age. 
In this respect the world has been grievously mis- 
taken. Men have fondly flattered themselves with 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 9 

the dream of a primitive Golden Age in which the 
ancestors of the race were somewhat as the angels, 
walking and communing with their fellows; loving 
each the other as himself ; ministering to the misfor- 
tunes of the few ; aspiring to be as the gods. It is 
only a dream — a phantasm of the poet's imagination— 
with no similitude in fact. We now know that the 
beginnings of human progress were with the wild 
creatures of the primeval woods, and in the dripping 
caves where extinct bears and hyenas had their lair. 
How hardly did man come forth from such a state 
and begin his career of progress and amelioration ! 
How hardly did he rise to the integrity of thought and 
the purity of conscience. We may well understand 
how toilsome and tedious has been the human, march. 
The rise of man has been as slow as the process of the 
suns. History has had to invent a calculus in order to 
discover the almost imperceptible movement of man- 
kind toward the light. Thousands upon thousands of 
years have passed away while this tedious history has 
been enacting, and even yet the emergence of man is 
far from perfect. He lingers still, like Milton's lion, 
with his hinder parts in the hillsides of barbarism. 
Only his better parts have been eliminated from the 
original dirt, out of which, by some process, he was 
taken. 



10 THE CITIZEN SOLDIE'R. 

The soldier of antiquity was indeed a man of 
blood. We are constrained to say that he was a 
homicide by profession. He was the easy chief of all 
butchery. It was his business not only to kill, but to 
exterminate. The discipline of his murderous voca- 
tion made him at once a cunning and ferocious 
destroyer of life. Several circumstances conspired to 
make him conspicuous above all other destructive 
agents as the prime hunter and killer of the world. 
In the first place, his own barbarous and almost con- 
scienceless character conduced to the freedom which 
he felt and rejoiced in as a slayer of men. It is diffi- 
cult for us in this age to conceive the sentiments, and 
emotions, and passions of the ancient warrior. In 
order to do so we have to feel our way backward by 
imagination through centuries of time and continents 
of space. Even when we have reached the station of 
the old time man of battle and slaughter, we are 
unable to enter into his feelings; share his impulses; 
or think his thoughts. The picturesque Taine has 
told us that of all hunts the man-hunt is the most 
noble and glorious. Doubtless it was so according to 
the standard of antiquity. We read of the horrid 
butcheries which have preserved to themselves a 
name and memory in the pages of ancient history. 
We draw back in horror from the picture of one of 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 11 

those ancient battle-fields heaped with its dead and 
dying, red with an ocean of blood pouring from the 
gashes in forty thousand breasts ; but we fail to 
remember that the other aspects of the life of 
antiquity were equally ferocious and dreadful. 

It was not, however, the innate savage nature only 
of the ancient battle-man that made him what he was. 
The theory of warfare which prevailed among all the 
ancient nations conduced to the same end. Nothing 
indeed can be more unlike another thing, belonging to 
the same class of facts with itself, than was ancient 
warfare unlike the warfare of to-day. The motives 
and principles governing the conduct of war in an- 
tiquity were sufficiently shocking and vicious. As a 
rule, mere robbery was the inspiring cause of battle. 
The men of one tribe seized upon the cattle of the 
men of another tribe ; drove them away ; hid them in 
caves and mountain gorges, and then took arms to 
beat back the assailants who came in hot pursuit. 
The tribesmen were much more concerned about the 
protection of property than they were for the protec- 
tion of life. One of seven brothers might be carried 
away and sold into slavery without great offense to 
the remaining six ; but woe to the robbers who drove 
away the flock or herd. 

War once undertaken was a matter of personal 



12 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

conflict. It was not only personal, but universal. 
Every man of the one tribe was the sworn enemy of 
every man of the other tribe. The law of war was 
that each should take or kill his enemy on sight. He 
might do it as he would, fairly or perfidiously, in 
manly fight of the open field or by stealthy thrust of 
the treacherous, and possibly the poisoned, spear in 
the dark. Quarter there was none. Flag of tfuce 
and armistice were as yet unknown. Division 
between sofdiery and citizenship, between the com- 
batant and the non-combatant, had not yet been 
drawn. The home and the product of the garden 
and field were as little sacred as were the spears and 
bows and slings of the enemy. All ages and sexes 
and conditions were swept into the vortex. All 
suffered alike at the hand of the invaders. The 
woman and her child were a part of that common 
enemy which the soldier of antiquity was pledged 
to kill or enslave. The old man with white locks, 
blossoming like the almond tree, and the rosy-cheeked 
boy with his child eyes and lisping tongue were alike 
thrust through and hurled down to death and oblivion. 
Thought can not conceive, or tongue express, or 
pen record the awful devastation, the woe, the 
carnage, the fire, the blood, the death, and universal 
wasting of that ancient savage warfare which was 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 13 

undertaken, not for the lawful redress of grievances 
or the maintenance of human rights, but under the 
vindictiveness of sheer passion and the blind rage 
of personal v/rong. 

As the chaotic society of the primitive ages was 
slowly evolved into higher conditions of life, the 
soldier was separated from the other social forces and 
became a distinct energy. He was dissociated from 
his fellows who, on the one hand, tilled the soil, and, 
on the other, ruled the State. He stood on the plane 
of the priesthood. Upon these two, the soldier and 
the priest, the king leaned as the principal pillars of 
support to his dynasty and throne. 

The condition as a whole is easily apprehended. 
The institution of monarchy universally prevailed. It 
can not be doubted that the monarchical form of gov- 
ernment is natural and inevitable in certain stages of 
human society. It is equally certain that a profes- 
sional priesthood and a professional soldiery are the 
necessary concomitants of monarchy. A king does 
not rule by right, reason, or the rational consent of his 
subjects. He is arrogant enough to say that his right 
to rule is the gift of Heaven, and that so far as earthly 
relations are concerned, his place at the head of society 
is determined by the accident of birth. 

It were hard to say which of these two assumptions 



14 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

is the more absurd. He who is fool enough to say 
that his civil authority is derived from on high instead 
of given by his fellowmen, may well be fool enough 
to claim a kingly rank in virtue of his birth. But 
whatever may be the genesis of the king, he has 
always found it necessary to buttress his throne with 
two things : force and superstition. The latter he has 
found abundantly supplied by the priests, and the 
former he has obtained in a professional soldiery. 

The great monarchies of antiquity were monu- 
ments of superstition and force. Armies of hardy and 
hardened soldiers were organized and maintained at 
the expense of the State, and were used by the king 
in enforcing his will, not only in civil administration, 
but in foreign war. The ancient army was a sort of 
battering-ram in the hands of the king. He set it up 
before the walls of his rebellious city, and the walls 
crumbled. He planted it before the gates of his 
enemy's capital, and the pillars thereof were battered 
down. In either event, pillage and ruin, fire and 
death, followed the catastrophe. License in all its 
forms was the gift of victory. 

What the individual warrior had been in the first 
ages of the world, that the army now became on a 
gigantic scale. The ancient army was a devouring 
monster, the breadth of whose bloody jaws, the depth 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 15 

of whose ravenous throat, the rage of whose burning 
lust, no pen could picture. Perhaps it was necessary 
in the order of things that such a beast should be 
loosed in the world. The student of history has at 
length come to understand that under certain condi- 
tions physical evil is moral force, and that much must 
be destroyed in order that a few things may live. He 
has come to know that nature herself, such as she is 
in a world like ours, is cruel, heartless, and blind, as 
well as tender, compassionate, and loving. The 
ancient army, horrible engine that it was, performed 
its part in the history of civilization and has hardly 
yet ceased to bray mankind in a mortar. 

It was an interesting and happy phase in the 
progress of the civilized life of man when the first 
touches and pencilings of the nobler sentiments were 
seen on the brow of war. Soldiers of all ranks and 
conditions in all parts of the world may well be proud 
of the fact that medieval Europe felt the first glow of 
moral enthusiasm in the ranks of her soldiery. It was 
at the close of the crusading epoch. Hundreds and 
thousands of European soldiers had joined their forces 
and set their faces to the East. There, in the City of 
David, the Infidel Turk sat cross-legged, smoking his 
pipe, and whetting his blade on the tomb of Christ. 
Most of the battlemen of the West perished in the 



16 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

Holy Wars, but the rest came back with the seeds of 
chivalry in their breasts. 

Ever afterwards there was seen, in greater 
brilliance or less, the new light of humanity on the 
soldier's helmet. True, the armies of Europe were 
destined for several centuries still to uphold and 
perpetuate the ferocious sentiments of antiquity and 
to practice the bloody butcheries of the past. But the 
dawn had come, and the day was sure to rise when 
the man of war should become as humane and honor- 
able amid the carnage of the field and the storming of 
cities as the man of peace had already become in the 
tillage of his field and the shopwork of his hamlet. 

The next striking phase in the evolution of the 
soldier was that which presents him under the garb 
of a citizen. There came to pass in the world, at 
length, a Citizen Soldier. The presence of such a 
fact among the energies of civilization implies several 
things. It implies, in the first place, the existence of 
some motive of warlike action sufficiently powerful to 
sway a multitude with a common passion. It signifies 
a popular recognition of some wrong that must be 
righted by force, some injustice that must be cured 
with the sword, some turpitude in human society 
that must be washed away with blood. Such motives 
of action can never appeal to a professional soldiery. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 17 

Warriors who are hired and disciplined in the art of 
destruction, as one may be taught architecture or 
dancing, become a machine as incapable of conscience 
and sentiment as a catapult or a locomotive. But the 
citizen is a patriot. He loves his home, his kindred, 
his native land ; and when occasion requires he draws 
the sword in their defense. 

The beginnings of a citizen soldiery were seen in 
the Classical Ages of antiquity. The citizens of 
Greece rose in times of the Persian invasion and 
dealt upon the foe the vengeance which only roused- 
up patriots are able to inflict. What the citizen 
converted into the soldier for the sake of native land 
is able to do by his valor was demonstrated for all 
ages at Marathon, at Plataea, at Salamis. In primitive 
Rome something of the same thing was seen. The 
sturdy patriots of the Republic left their plows in the 
field at the call of the Senate, and interposed their 
rough breasts and brawny arms between the city and 
barbarous invasion. 

But these were the exceptions to the general rule. 
The Roman armies in the times of the Empire were 
simply an aggregation of brute force wielded by ter- 
rified despots or ambitious demagogues. 

In modern times we have seen the fuller and more 
glorious emergence of a citizen soldiery. So far as 



18 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

my study has extended, I should say that the first 
example of such a soldiery, on a grand scale, was 
furnished by the English armies in the times of the 
Commonwealth. Cromwell's Ironsides, psalm-singing 
bigots as they were, were, at the bottom, citizens 
who knew what they were fighting for, as well 
as they knew how to fight. On the other side 
the Cavaliers stood for the past. They stood for 
mediaeval traditions as well as for mediaeval govern- 
ment. They stood for aristocracy, for the divine 
right of kings, for the few against the many, and 
for the king against the few. They stood for 
ecclesiasticism, for arbitrary rule, license for those 
who have the power, and slavery for those who have 
it not. But the Cromwellian soldiery stood for the 
Under Man. It was a power that rose as if from the 
earth. It was of titanic grandeur. Its might was the 
might of a thunderbolt; its energies were the com- 
bined energies of that long repressed people who at 
length burst through the crust of tyranny and smote 
the tyrant with a fatal blow. 

It remained, however, for the last quarter of the 
eighteenth century to exhibit in its purest form a 
true citizen soldiery. The future, better than the 
present, will understand for how many things His- 
tory is indebted to this New World which we call 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 19 

America. Our fathers were pioneers, not only of the 
great republican experiment in government, but of 
many other things almost as salutary and glorious. 
Among these other things the principle of patriotic 
self-defense by means of the people themselves, risen 
against wrong, armed for the occasion and com- 
manded, strangely enough, by their own neighbors, 
was one of the m.ost conspicuous facts. Our fathers 
of the Old Thirteen Colonies had little acquaintance 
with a professional soldiery, and that little was 
unfavorable in the last degree. The occasional regi- 
ments of regulars and mercenaries who from time to 
time made their way to the American shores were 
not of a character or bearing to impress themselves 
with favor upon the hardy and virtuous men of the 
Colonies. The latter looked ever askance at this 
foreign soldiery, and wished it back in its own place 
beyond the sea. 

The struggle of these two forces, namely, the 
self-defending, patriotic. Colonial militia, on the one 
side, and the professional, mercenary, foreign army 
on the other, was conspicuously and memorably 
illustrated in the campaign of Braddock. We all 
recall the story. Ever after the dreadful disaster "in 
which that campaign ended, the native. Colonial, 
citizen soldier became more and more powerful — 



20 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

more and more the reliance of his own colony first, 
and then of all the colonies as represented in the 
Continental Congress. 

During the Revolutionary era, our fathers created 
the noblest military contingent which had yet been 
seen in the tides of time. The Continental army 
was born of the earth. It sprang from the ground 
in the hour of peril. At first it was -an object of 
derision and scorn to the disciplined and pampered 
legions which were sent against us. Undoubtedly 
there was cause for ridicule and laughter. We must 
remember the character of the throng which gathered 
around Boston, in 1775, for the expulsion of the 
British. The battle of Bunker Hill had just been 
fought. The news of it flew on the wings of the 
wind. The men of New England sprang to arms and 
came flocking from all quarters. Each had his own 
accoutrements and uniform. The accoutrements 
were powder-horn, bullet-moulds and rifle. The uni- 
form was a signal failure. It had no likeness to 
anything but itself. Each was of its own kind and 
pattern. What an impression the motley throng — 
each intent on the one great business of firing a well- 
aimed block of lead into a Red-coat hireling — must 
have made on the sedate Washington, as he rode 
out under the Cambridge elm to take the command 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 21 

in chief! But there was mettle in such a soldiery. 
Every heart had its altar and its fire. There was 
an incense of patriotism rising above that unique 
camp more odorous in the nostrils of Heaven than 
the smell of burning bullocks in the courtyard of 
Solomon's temple. 

The spirit thus enkindled in the New World soon 
flamed high, and its light was seen across the Atlan- 
tic. It were difficult to say to what extent the great 
Revolution which now came on in France was born 
of an enthusiasm which had its first warmth on this 
side of the sea. In that sunny land, also, a great 
soldiery arose as if by magic. Liberty put his bugle 
to his lips and blew a blast which echoed far against 

" castle walls 

And snowy summits old in story." 

Never was seen a more glorious exhibition of patriotic 
force than that displayed by the French people in 
their wild charge for emancipation and the rights of 
man. No Austrian battery, no army of Emigrant 
Nobles, not all the combined cohorts of Feudal Europe 
could withstand the impetuous onset of the terrible 
French democracy, roaring like an avalanche, as it 
fell with irresistible force upon the enemy. Such 
was the burning vehemence of that onset that the 
very landmarks of civilization, set up centuries before 



22 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

by the kings and princes of tlie Middle Ages, were 
swept into oblivion. Traditions perished ; ancient 
customs died in a night ; the whole form and fashion 
of French society were made anew in the storm of 
battle, and Liberty, with flaming eyes and cap of 
Phrygia on her majestic brow, held aloft a gleaming 
sword-blade in the light of the new morning which 
had risen for the human race. 

At the close of the great Revolutionary era, this 
magnificent citizen soldiery which had fought the 
battle of freedom, first in America and then in France, 
lost at once its warlike character and melted away 
among the people from whom it had sprung. These 
phenomena were new in the history of the world. 
Man had not hitherto displayed his activities in such 
a manner. The soldier of the war period resumed 
his relations in society, and became the citizen again 
in the period of peace. The principle had been 
perfectly demonstrated that the people of a nation 
are able to rise at the nation's call and defend it 
from harm. More than this, it was shown beyond 
the possibility of doubt that the people thus insurgent 
are able to seize the governing powers and compel 
them to the great work of reform. No man could 
any longer doubt that the civil society of America 
and of a large part of Western Europe had been 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 28 

regenerated by the revolt of the people and their 
conversion into armies. 

The subsidence of the citizen soldiery to its former 
place and functions in the nation left at least two 
great and salutary benefits to mankind. The first 
of these was the effect which the people's army pro- 
duced upon the army of the State. Hitherto, as we 
have seen, the soldier's work had been, for the most 
part, a kind of professional and mercenary butchery, 
done in the service of the State and frequently 
against the aspirations and best interests of the 
people. It was the business of the old-time army to 
fight whatever opposed it until the opposition was 
broken ; to march about in obedience to the command 
of generals who were themselves commanded by the 
king ; to camp and decamp ; to plunder or refrain from 
plundering at the dictation of the State. 

It was precisely such a force as this that the 
people's army, the great citizen soldiery, had to con- 
tend with in the American and French Revolutions. 
Opposing armies on battle-fields shoot into each 
other's breasts many other things besides lead. The 
battery throws not only iron but thought. Your 
musket is a great dispenser of sentiment. In an 
intelligent age, fighting men discharge their opinions 
at each other as forcibly as they discharge their 



24 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

bullets. Every storm is an agent and mode of 
equilibrium. The thunder-clouds send into each 
other their positive and negative flashes of light and 
heat. So of contending armies. This is to say that 
the regular soldiery, such as it was at the close of 
the eighteenth century, received in the shock of battle 
the sentiments of the people. While the people were 
learning to fight, the professional soldier was, for the 
first time in his life, learning to think. He saw that 
the people's army was alive with thought. He also 
perceived that it was heated with a patriotic enthu- 
siasm to which he had hitherto been a stranger. He 
began to FEEL. Hitherto he had felt nothing. Hitherto 
he had been a machine, doing his work under the 
touch and monition of the general's sword. Now he 
saw a great soldiery moved by another force, and he 
recognized the superiority of the motive over that by 
which he himself had been impelled to battle. 

From this time forth the hard and brutal outlines 
in the face of professional war began to relax and 
soften. Then it was, indeed, that grim-visaged war 
did smooth his wrinkled front. Henceforth the regular 
army held a changed relation to the people. The 
soldier by profession began to sympathize with the 
citizen soldier and to acknowledge his higher calling. 
Since the Revolutionary epoch, it has become almost 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 25 

impossible to compel a European army to fight the 
people. One army will fight another army. The 
forces of one state will cross the border and confront 
the forces of another state in deadly conflict, as of 
old. But let a great city be shaken by an insurrec- 
tion of the people ; let the ruler send out his orders 
to his regulars to fire upon the insurgents and run 
them down with bayonet charges in the streets, 
and the orders are at once disobeyed. Soldiers by 
profession, in every capital of Europe, are no longer 
trusted to butcher their fellow-citizens when they 
rise with banners in their hands and assail the battle- 
ments of power in some righteous insurrection. This 
great change in the manners and sentiments of the 
professional soldiery of the world has been produced 
by its contact with the citizen soldiery new risen 
from the people. 

In the next place, the citizen soldiery of the Age 
of Revolution taught the kings of the world a signifi- 
cant and memorable lesson. Hitherto the rulers of 
mankind had fondly imagined themselves infallible. 
The monarchs of Europe had their dread of one 
another ; each feared that his fellow king was 
stronger than himself, and that he might rise against 
him by battle or diplomacy, and make him his vassal. 
But none of them feared their subjects. All looked 



26 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

Upon the people as the mere material which kings and 
generals and priests must have for the necessary 
practice of their arts. The attitude of your sovereign 
toward his subject was, in this respect, much like that 
of the big medicine man of modern times whose pro- 
fession would be a nullity if he had no material on 
which to expend his science and consume his drugs ! 

This coming of the citizen soldier, this manifesta- 
tion of his power as an agent of progress and 
righteousness, was the beginning of a new era in 
the civilized life of man. It was in some sense the 
premonition of the reign of the people. The thing 
done in the great revolutions in our own country 
and in France became the principal impulse of a 
reformation which has already expanded over half 
the world. There is not a nation in all Europe west 
of the Vistula which has not been to some extent 
regenerated by the influences shed forth by the 
citizen soldiery of the French republican armies. The 
same is true in a still greater degree of the influence 
diffused by our own Revolutionary soldiery of 1776. 
The people everywhere have become conscious, not 
only of their political, but of their military power. 
Governments of all forms and fashions have taken a 
wholesome dread of the physical force resident in the 
people. It is at once instructive and amusing to wit- 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER, 27 

ness the changed tone and bearing of your king, your 
prince, your emperor, and sometimes your president, 
when the ominous murmur of a dissatisfied and rising 
people is heard in the distance. The manners of our 
rulers have been greatly improved within the present 
century, and it is not impossible that with the lapse 
of another hundred years they may attain the stature 
and title of gentlemen. 

It was one of the peculiarities of the ancient world 
that its Force and its Thought drew in opposite direc- 
tions. What men thought, looked to certain ends 
which were still ideal and apparently unattainable. 
Plato conceived a REPUBLIC, and wrote the outlines 
of its structure and methods in a beautiful treatise 
which the highest minds of the world still peruse with 
delight. But his Republic was a dream. Not even 
the author conceived the possibility of such a govern- 
ment as a practical fact among men. All the physical 
forces of ancient society ran to despotism. They 
tended to the production of great consolidated struc- 
tures — civil, political, and religious — under which 
mankind were pressed and flattened against the 
earth. The enterprises of society were not directed 
by thought, but by sheer ebullitions of passion and 
caprice. The thinker, the artist, the poet, the orator, 
the historian, wrought in one direction, and the king. 



28 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

the warrior, the priest, the noble, and even the slave, 
wrought in another ; so that society was distraught 
and pulled asunder between them. 

Under such a condition there could be no social 
unity. The government was one thing, and the 
people — at least so many of the people as had risen 
to thought and conscience — were another thing. The 
physical energy of society dashed hither and yon like 
a wild beast plunging in the arena. All they who had 
attained to ideality, to the higher forms of conscious- 
ness and hope, drew apart from the wind of violence ; 
secluded themselves in shady places by green banks 
of flowing streams ; gave way to reverie ; imagined the 
forms and features of things unseen, and dreamed of 
beautiful nymphs dwelling in the woods and waters. 
It was thus that the thought of the ancient world 
inhabited a body with wings, while the force of 
antiquity resided in a beast with fangs and terrible 
claws. While the one traversed the air and bathed 
in cloud and sunlight, the other wallowed in swamps 
and caves, or came forth only to crush the bones of 
innocence and peace. 

The citizen soldier did one of his noblest works in 
harmonizing the thought and force of the world. 
After his appearance — after his first ascendency at 
the close of the eighteenth century — force became 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 29 

humane, and thought a practical energy. The divorce 
which had held for so many ages between the dreams 
and the deeds of mankind was abolished, and hence- 
forth the sons of Adam began to imagine what they 
would have, and to have what they imagined. Hence- 
forth it was possible to do an ideal thing and to think 
a reality. True, the alienation between the thinking 
and the doing has not yet wholly passed away ; but, 
thanks to the citizen soldier, it is no longer necessary 
that a poet should cease to eat the food of men, or 
that a king should be a dreamless idiot. 

The history of the present century has been the 
history of the development of those principles in civil 
society for which the citizen soldiery rose and fought 
a hundred years ago. The progress of the European 
and American nations has been commensurate with 
the incorporation of those principles in the practices of 
men. Of a certainty, society has not at all times gone 
forward with equal pace. It is true that not every 
epoch and every condition is equally favorable for the 
production of a citizen soldiery or for the display of its 
highest qualities. Nations have their heroic ages, 
after which there is likely to supervene an epoch of 
lethargy and reaction. Man himself obeys the same 
law. He sometimes has a season of high resolve and 



30 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

tremendous display of virtue, and at other times he 
has his era of indolence, apathy and stupid sleep. 

Here in our America we have seen these principles 
often and amply illustrated. It is my purpose in the 
remainder of the present discussion to limit the inquiry 
to the United States, and to speak of the part which 
our citizen soldiery has borne in the development 
and maintenance of our nationality. After our heroic 
age, at the close of the eighteenth century, there 
was a lull in our history of the kind to which we have 
just referred. It is certain that the men of 1812 were 
not the men of the Revolution. I would not by 
any means disparage the American soldiers who con- 
tended with the Mother Country in our second war 
for national independence. But it is only the truth 
of history that the war of 1812 was commonplace, 
unheroic, without rational motives in its beginning, 
or logical results in its end. You have only to glance 
at the Treaty of Ghent to note that not a single one of 
the alleged principles for which the war was under- 
taken was so much as mentioned in the compact with 
which it was concluded. The war was, therefore, 
an absurdity ; and it is impossible that an absurdity 
should ever evoke a great citizen soldiery. This is 
to say that the citizen soldier as distinguished from 
the battleman of the Middle Ages must, if he fight 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 31 

well, know what he is fighting for. In our second 
war with Great Britain, some of our armies rose at 
times almost to the heroic level. Scott and Brown, 
just beyond the rapids of Niagara, where the rising 
spray of the incomparable Falls caught the flashes 
of the setting sun and held aloft a hundred rainbows 
over the chasm while the British were hurled back 
from the heights of Chippewa, were on the level 
where the fathers had stood in the days of '76. The 
sturdy and inflexible Jackson behind his bulwark 
of cotton bales, telling his men of Tennessee to 
withhold their terrible fire till the fated soldiers of 
Pakenham were ready to leap the trenches, and 
then hurling them with one blast to defeat, destruc- 
tion, and death, may be numbered with the men of 
the Revolution — with Sumter and Greene and Putnam 
and Mad Anthony Wayne. 

For the rest, the war of 1812 was tame and weak 
— vague in its methods, feeble in its execution. We 
had had an outcry about **Free Trade and Sailors' 
Rights'*; but the Free Trade was a more uncertain 
thing than it has since become on the lips of Ameri- 
can demagogues. It had no definite meaning. James 
Madison himself could not have drawn a paper in 
which the sense of that Free Trade used as the 
battle-cry of the war was adequately explained. The 



32 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

Sailors' Rights were also dim and far between. 
Certainly, Great Britain had been abusive and arro- 
gant on the high seas. She had seized and searched 
American ships ; but it was with the definite purpose 
of finding an Irishman ! She was not hunting for 
Brother Jonathan at all. She claimed then, as she 
had ever claimed since the Middle Ages, that the 
Irishman was hers. She did not propose that he 
should slip away to America and become a democrat. 
Therefore she arrested him in his flight. She did 
so under a code of international law which has long 
since been blown away. Tacitly the abuse ceased 
with the war of 1812, so far as American citizens 
were concerned, and to that extent the conflict had 
its value. But for the most part, the war was futile 
and flagrant, wicked and weak. 

It was for these reasons that no great characters 
either of war or of peace were developed in our second 
contest with Great Britain. No warrior President 
arose to testify to the greatness of the conflict. Those 
who were great before the war remained so after- 
ward, and those who subsequently became great did 
so, not because of the war of 1812, but without regard 
thereto. The score of years which succeeded the con- 
test with the Mother Country was perhaps the feeblest 
period in American history. The citizen soldier had 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 33 

found in the crisis no cause of inspiration, no motive 
for those heroic activities which, when they are 
exhibited on an ample and fitting field, make men 
even as the gods. 

Much of what has here been said respecting our 
last war with Great Britain may be repeated of the 
war with Mexico. The latter had in it many elements 
of popularity which were wanting in the former ; but 
it could not be said that on the whole the Mexican 
war was honorably undertaken or honorably closed. 
Certainly there is a difference between honor and 
glory. We got glory enough — and territory enough — 
from our war with Mexico. The setting of the battle- 
scene was picturesque in the last degree. The move- 
ment was so far away as to excite the imagination. 
Either a journey across the infinite plains of Texas, or 
a long voyage by sea was necessary to carry the 
American army to the enemy's coast. There lay the 
Rio Grande, the great international river, dividing the 
two warlike republics. Its appearance to the men of 
the North was like the Euphrates to the eyes of the 
Greeks of Xenophon. The land had the strangest of 
aspects. There were thickets of chaparral, beds of 
extinct rivers, smoking volcanoes in the horizon, a 
tropical sky in which huge vultures floated lazily, 
watching the camps below. Further on, the mountains 



34 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

rose ; the pathway of the invaders lay over their 
crests. There the subHme Cordilleras lifted their, 
summits to the line of perpetual snow. 

The American army fought its way to the crest. 
It traversed the rocky pass of Cerro Gordo, defended 
by the best soldiers and best artillery of the nation. 
Then the invading forces, with the stars and stripes 
above them, swept on to the summit and looked down 
from those mountain heights upon the glorious valley 
and the far-off shining city of an ancient race. Then 
came other heroic fighting. Churubusco and Cha- 
pultepec still lay between the conquering army and 
the capital. But nothing could resist the onset. The 
city was won. The hero of Lundy's Lane, with 
fewer than six thousand men, rode triumphantly, 
in the glow of the summer morning, into the Grand 
Plaza, and the banner of the American Republic 
shot up to the glimmering spire over the halls of the 
Montezumas. 

Every circumstance of the invasion — the country, 
the people, the landscape, the strangeness of the 
conditions ; to say nothing of the glamour of foreign 
warfare and ever-repeated victory — conspired to give 
to this conflict with Mexico the form and substance, 
as well as the name, of glory. But when we reflect 
upon the vicious principles which underlay the conflict. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 35 

nd particularly when we look into the bottom of the 
ap and see coiled therein the old adder of slavery — 
or t!at, indeed, was the primary motive of extending 
> ou • boundaries to the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and 
the Pacific — we must, as many of our Whig fathers 
did, st'c:''t back with horror at the injustice of such 
■gain foi such an end. True, the soldiers who fought 
the battit'i of that war knew not that they were hew- 
ing their vay through the Mexican Republic, beat- 
ing dowp the national authority and exacting the 
severest c^ all treaties under the very knife and 
bludgeon of .ictory, only to extend the area of human 
bondage ; bu- the men who prepared and precipitated 
the crisis knt v full well the meaning and the motive 
of the conflict. In so far as slavery was an ignomini- 
ous institution ; \\\ so far as it cursed both the master 
and the slave ; in so far as it brought a blight and a 
mildew on the fairest; the most fertile, and we may say 
the miost generous, part of the American Union — just 
in that measure and degree was the Mexican war an 
unholy aggression on a sister state, a great iniquity 
done in the sight of earth and heaven. 

The men of the war came home from their heroic 
discipline in the land of the ancient Aztecs. They 
brought with them victory and fame. They were 
received with shouts, and were justly regarded as 



36 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

the upholders of the national honor, the defenders o 
the reputation of the American soldiery. Neverthe 
less, the war with the Mexican Republic was not ; 
citizen soldier's war. In the first battles there were iio 
volunteers. The conflict lacked the essential elements 
of truth and righteousness and conscience. It partook 
too much of the nature of conquest and brutal triumph 
over a fallen foe. It was a war between unequals 
won by the stronger. On the whole, iv may be 
doubted whether the reputation of the great United 
States in the days to come, and at the solemn bar 
of history, will not be dimmed rather than brightened 
by the conquering invasion which our armies made 
beyond the Rio Grande in the summer of '47. 

Now it was that our American territories spread 
out in one broad band from ocean to ocean. The 
wrong to Mexico, whatever it was, was done. The 
English-speaking race had moved forward its outposts 
to Paso del Norte, to the Gulf of California, and to 
those vast solitudes of the great Northwest 

" Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 
Save his own dashings." 

We had now attained the proportions of an empire. 
More than three millions of square miles were ours. 
Rivers and lakes and plains were ours. Illimitable 
prairies and the snow-crowned Rockies were ours. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 37 

Iron and coal, and silver and gold, were ours. 
Progress and power, multiplying states and a teem- 
ing people — resolute, vigorous ; heated with the fires 
of a thousand enterprises — were ours. Reputation 
at home and abroad was ours. The charm of the 
American Republic had diffused itself through all 
lands, from the foothills of Burmah to the upper 
fountains of the River Amazon. If we had only 
been just ; if we had only lived by the Declaration 
of Independence ; if we had only dared to say that 
**all men" MEANT all men, we might, indeed, have 
gone forward with unimpeded strides to an immortal 
destiny. 

But sin was at the door. That ancient crime, 
old as the first victory of the human brute over his 
fellow — that primal, heaviest curse under which the 
civilized life of man has groaned even from the 
barbarous ages of antiquity — coiled around the root 
of the American tree, and its blossoms became 
poisonous, its fruit as the apples of Sodom, and its 
dews as the dews of the fabled Upas. No language 
can describe, no imagination conceive, the social, 
political, and moral condition into which this great 
country had sunk at the middle of our century. We 
had nearly all fallen under the dominion of the same 
fallacy, the same horrid delusion. The judgment of 



38 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

•the American people was corrupted and its conscience 
depraved by the criminal disease of slavery. 

Our children will have need to see the authentic 
testimony ere they will believe the story of African 
bondage in the United States. The appalling shadow 
lay not only on the South, but on the North. The 
great States of the Mississippi Valley had been in 
large measure populated by the poorer classes from 
the Border States beyond the Ohio. Our fathers 
here in the West were poor men, who had been 
squeezed out by the cruel discipline of slavery and 
driven to seek their fortunes in the unoccupied wilds 
of the Northwest Territory. Unfortunately, slavery 
had left its impress upon them. They believed in 
the righteousness of the system. They had heard 
''Cursed be Canaan" from the pulpit. They had 
imbibed the malevolent principles of the system from 
the fireside talk of their fathers and grandfathers in 
Kentucky and Virginia and the Carolinas. They had 
drawn the poison with their mothers' milk from the 
very fountain of life. We were all besotted together. 
We all agreed that slavery was good and righteous 
and necessary ; that the abolitionist was the enemy 
of mankind, and that his adequate punishment could 
be effected only with the tools of the Inquisition. 

It now seems to us amazing that such a horror 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 39 

could have possessed one-half of the United States 
and cast its baleful shadow over the other half even 
to the clear waters of the Northern lakes. We need 
to be reminded that within the quick memory of 
men still young, children were born and bred for 
the auction block ; that hundreds and thousands 
of them were sold by their own fathers to slave- 
drivers, in comparison with whose heartless cruelties 
the bloody passions of bull-dogs and hounds were as 
the zephyrs of May to the roaring blasts of Decem- 
ber ; that mothers with new-born babes were set up 
under the hammer of the auctioneer in the market- 
place of almost every county town, and were 
sold with as little compunction as cows and she- 
mules ; that maidens scarcely yellowed with African 
blood were compelled to stand half-naked, surroun- 
ded Vv^ith gaping crowds, drunken and hilarious with 
the excitements of the sale-day, and be handled with 
the vile hands of the traders, examining their teeth 
and arms and open bosoms and limbs, to discover 
the signs ot vitality as the reason of higher bidding; 
that the rattle of the chain was heard on every 
highway leading from our Border States to the 
sugar-plantations, the cotton-fields, and the rice- 
swamps where the dusky creatures were delivered 
over to the tender mercy of slave-drivers, with whip 



40 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

and branding-iron and bludgeon, to be scourged and 
burned and beaten out of the image and semblance 
of human nature, down to the blackness of despair 
and the ignominy of unknown and unblest graves. 
The lesson will be good for us and our descen- 
dants to the tenth generation. 

We may be sure that such a curse as the system 
of slavery proved to be in the United States a half 
a century ago can not remain forever without arous- 
ing the indignation and the hostility of many a brave 
heart strong enough and true enough to rise in rebel- 
lion and smite it with a fatal blow. In our day of 
degeneracy and national crime the deepest darkness 
preceded the dawn. 

1 have enlarged upon the condition of our nation 
and people in order to set in a strong light the one 
great antecedent and bottom cause of our Civil War. 
I have done so to the end that our minds may be 
refreshed as to the true elements of that tremen- 
dous conflict. We here arrive at a condition of 
precisely the kind to call from the very ground the 
most majestic and resolute citizen soldiery ever seen 
under the circle of the sun. Here was the grand 
reason and motive which inspired the men of '6i 
to leave the farm and the shop, the hamlet, the 
village, the city, to take their places with musket 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 41 

and sword under the starry banner given us by our 
fathers, and to offer their lives by the sanction of 
an immutable oath that the land should be made 
whole and clean from ocean to ocean, from the 
Southern Gulf to the pine woods of the Columbia. 
We all remember how, at the outbreak of our 
War for the Union, men beat about to find some 
other than the true cause for the dreadful storm 
which had burst upon us. The American mind was 
still, in large measure, under the dominion of fallacies. 
Even the greatest were not free from gross miscon- 
ception and misjudgment of the conditions which were 
surging around us. The Republican party itself failed 
and refused to avow the true principle by which it 
was impelled. It even denied the necessity of its own 
existence by declaring its willingness to save and 
perpetuate a slave-holding Union. It is true, how- 
ever, that the Under Man, who is always sooner or 
later the wisest man, perceived more clearly than 
our leaders and rulers the real enemy that must be 
slain. Ostensibly our great war was a war for the 
preservation of the Union. But what had endan- 
gered the Union ? Who had made the attack upon 
our nationality ? And why ? For what reason had 
nearly one-third of the whole American people come 
to despise the Union which the fathers framed for 



42 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

US a hundred years ago ? Why did the Secessionists 
wish to destroy the national authority and to scatter 
its representatives ? Why were the sacred memo- 
ries and traditions of the Revolution forgotten and 
despised in that hour of passion and mortal folly ? 
Simply because the Union had become an impediment 
and menace to the institution of slavery. During the 
greater part of the century the national authority 
had been held as a shield over the head and bound 
like a girdle around the loins of slavery. He who 
looks attentively at the history of our country from 
1821 to the outbreak of the Civil War can but 
perceive that the whole force of the Nation, as 
represented by the government at Washington, was 
devoted to slavery as one might be devoted to 
an idol. It seemed to be the one great end for 
which the Union was created to foster, perpetuate, 
extend and guard that atrocious system of servitude 
which the misfortune of our early history and the 
avarice and cruelty of after times had entailed upon 
us. All the waters of great Neptune's ocean can not 
wash the horrid stain from our escutcheon. The 
record is indelible, and the American Union will to 
the end of time and the final assize of nations be 
obliged to face its ancient sin and shame. 

At length, however, a new generation arose in 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 43 

the North, and in parts of the South as well, whose 
life and thought were no longer poisoned and per- 
verted by the system of slavery. More healthful 
breezes began to blow. A feeling of repugnance to 
human bondage and to the agencies by which it 
was perpetuated and extended began to work in the 
national conscience, and a murmur was heard around 
the horizon which he who would place his ear to 
the ground might hear afar as the premonition of a 
great storm. 

The time has now arrived when we may speak 
without prejudice or passion of that tremendous 
political transformation which, beginning at the mid- 
dle of the sixth decade, swelled higher and higher 
through the ensuing three years, broke in a long 
line of foam across the prairies of Illinois when the 
tall, gaunt Lincoln declared that a house divided 
against itself can not stand, and rushed with a puri- 
fying tempest through the nation in the fall of i860. 
Never has history presented mankind at a better 
advantage than in the rising of the American people 
against the aggressions of slavery in the soul-stirring 
campaigns of 1856-58. It was the coming of an 
army with banners. The very thing itself, that 
marvelous insurrection of the American conscience, 
was the prophecy of our recovery and salvation. 



44 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

Then it was that the inventive genius of the Under 
Man put the five F's on his banner and bore it 
everywhere through the countryside and the streets 
of his village. And the five F's stood for Free 
Speech, Free Press, Free Schools, Free Kansas and 
Fremont. In that day men found something worthy 
of debating and voting for. The very fundamental 
principles and groundwork of our American institu- 
tions were on trial in the fiery ordeal into which we 
swept. It looked like going into a furnace. But 
down in the bottom of it the eye of patriotic faith 
could see men walking in the midst of the flames, 
and standing among them was the shining and 
unscorched angel of Liberty. 

Now in the retrospect there seems no wonder that 
the apologists, defenders, champions, and dovotees 
of slavery took a fatal alarm at the work done in 
November of i860. The election of Lincoln was to 
them indeed the handwriting on the wall. As they 
strained their angry eyes in the direction of the 
Great Lakes they saw in the blue sky the flaming 
trilogy of MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. They rightly 
apprehended that the Power on high had numbered 
their kingdom and finished it. They saw clearly 
enough that with them and their institution it was 
then or never. They perceived that slavery was 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 45 

about to be pent up ; that a rim of iron and wrath 
was about to be bound around it, and that no 
future revolution of public opinion would ever break 
the barrier. They also knew that it is in the 
nature of sin and crime thus hampered, bound 
in and compressed to perish by asphyxia and 
atrophy. Therefore they must suddenly exert 
themselves in order to revive and perpetuate the 
system of human bondage. But the Government 
now stood in the way. The national authority was 
about to pass into the hands of one whose strange 
destiny had lifted him to the seat of power and 
responsibility. His fidelity was already known to 
the lovers of freedom, as it was, ere long, to be 
known to all the nations of the earth. It was clear 
that the Union could no longer be used in the 
interest of the upbuilding, maintenance, and exten- 
sion of slavery. Rather was it certain that the 
whole power of the nation was now against the 
spirit and the domination, not to say the fact, of 
human servitude. 

It thus happened that the American Union became 
the object of extreme hatred and dread to the slavery 
propagandists and fire-eaters of the South, while 
at the same time it became doubly dear, doubly 
sacred to the opponents of slavery, since to them 



46 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

it represented the means and ministry of deliver- 
ance and regeneration. Thus it came to pass that 
we had a war FOR the Union on the one side, 
and AGAINST the Union on the other. But at bottom 
it was a war between slavery and freedom. Two 
principles had risen like spirits from the earth. 
The one was the principle of free labor and eman- 
cipation ; the other, the principle of bond labor and 
proscription. As the armies went forth to battle, 
these two spirits hovered ever above them in the 
smoke of the conflict, and the conflict could only 
cease when the bright spirit had caught the dark in 
mid-air and hurled him down from the concave to 
the abyss of death and perdition. It was the 
grapple of Michael with Beelzebub, and the struggle 
could only end with the overthrow of the angel of 
wrath, or with the annihilation of the evil genius who 
opposed him. 

Here then was an issue in our American society 
which all might see and understand. it was not 
a question involving abstractions and casuistry for 
the learned, but a question for the judgment and 
conscience of the common man. The farmer could 
apprehend it. The wood-cutters in their breathing 
spell between the fall of the tree and their attack 
on the trunk could discuss the crisis and denounce 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 47 

the enemy. The blacksmith might hammer this 
living issue into the blazing bar of iron on his 
anvil, and the maker of shoes could drive the heel- 
spikes through so plain a question of right and 
wrong, of truth and falsehood. It thus happened 
that when the volcano broke into eruption, when 
the whole sky was lighted up with the awful glare 
of war, the people at once made the cause their 
cause, and devoted their substance and their lives 
to the maintenance of the Union and the defense of 
native land. 

Never before did a question arise which seemed 
so to shake, not only the American household, but 
the house itself. It was perceived that the con- 
flict which had burst upon the country involved no 
less than the existence and salvation of American 
society. It was home or no home ; government or 
no government ; Union or no Union ; country or 
no country ; human liberty or no human liberty, 
not only for the present but for all time to come. 

Such was the momentous occasion which evoked 
from the bosom of the American people that great 
army of citizen soldiers who arose and donned the 
blue in the spring and summer of 1861. It was 
necessary that the citizen soldier should come, and 
com.e quickly, to the rescue of the nation. How. 



48 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

impotent was the professional soldier in the presence 
of that great emergency ! How totally inadequate 
was the American army to contend with so terrible 
an enemy ! A few thousand men, taught in the 
tactics of theoretical war, and commanded by officers 
whose ideas of actual warfare had been gathered in 
Mexico, were scattered on distant frontiers watching 
the dangerous antics of Indians. Many — perhaps 
a majority — of the few who composed the ranks of 
the regular army were men of the South, whose 
sympathies, as the sequel showed, were with the 
Secession cause and with the evil institution which 
gave that cause its vehemence and vitality. Truly, 
if the American Union had had to depend, in that 
trying ordeal, upon the army which the nation pos- 
sessed, then indeed would there have come a univer- 
sal wreck and cataclysm in which all things would 
have rushed down together. The Constitution of the 
United States would have been blown to fragments, 
and the watcher on the mountain tops, as he gazed 
upon the throbbing of the earthquake, would have 
seen the monument of Washington and the dome of 
the Capitol nod and totter and crash down into a 
hopeless and endless oblivion. 

Certainly 1 do not disparage the noble band of 
regulars who, called by the voice of the nation. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 49 

responded quickly and became a sort of nucleus 
around which the living masses of the great citizen 
soldiery were gathered. Much less would I disparage 
those patriotic officers who, whether in the field or 
in the ranks of private life, remembered the duty 
which they owed to the nation, answered the nation's 
call, drew their swords and hurried to the post of 
danger. I do not forget that the genius of the war, 
that the skill of generalship and command by which 
the war was at last directed to a successful end, had 
been nurtured in the great School on the banks of 
the Hudson. We may not forget that the Silent 
Man of Galena, and the grim captain who led the 
Union host with flying banners from Atlanta to the 
sea, and that most brilliant young American cavalry 
officer who on his black horse came flying like the 
very genius of battle to Winchester town, bringing 
victory in the fire of his eye and the flash of his 
sword, were all men from the barracks and drill- 
halls of West Point. But on the other hand, we 
must remember — ever remember — that the great host 
who followed the flag and met the enemy and won 
the battle was a citizen soldiery, gathered suddenly 
from the ranks of the people. We must not forget 
how the brave boys emerged from their quiet homes ; 
how they were watched by mothers and sisters and 



50 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

sweethearts with tearful faces and throbbing hearts 
and spirits that seemed suddenly choked in their 
bosoms as the stripplings marched away down the 
road, over the hill, out of sight, they knew not 
whither, to the terrible experiences, hardships and 
perils of war. They were boys from the country- 
side, from the villages, the towns, the cities. They 
nearly all had homes and loved ones behind them. 
They were young. Perhaps a large majority of them 
had never cast a vote. Their faces were still smooth 
and their cheeks rosy with the fresh blood of youth. 
Some had known hard fare and toil and poverty, 
but many had been nursed in tenderness and ease 
and luxury. The hands were often blistered with 
the first use of the musket, and the feet were worn 
and sore with the trial march. All hopes, all aspi- 
rations were in the breasts of that splendid young 
soldiery. The refmed sentiment and the poetic dream 
were in that army as well as the spirit of battle ; but 
the one prevailing passion was a patriotic devotion to 
the cause of the Union, and the one inspiration was 
the ambition to fight bravely and well the nation's 
battle, and to win and bring back with victory a flag 
unstained and unpolluted. 

The spirit of our age has brought out discussion 
not a little about the real character and composition 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 51 

of the Union army. Many things have been alleged 
about the social, political and industrial sources from 
which that great soldiery was derived. At the time 
when the battle raged, and even in the years imme- 
diately succeeding, no one thought to inquire with 
nicety into the character and origin of the Man in 
Blue. It was sufficient, when the emergency was on, 
that he was a good fighter, that he kept his bayonet 
towards the enemy, that he was sound in body and 
spirit, and that he meant to bring home a flag with 
all its stars restored. After the lapse of a quarter 
of a century, however, when the day of payment 
and recompense has come, many persons — particu- 
larly our distinguished paymasters — have taken the 
habit of inquiring into the origin — the genesis, the 
exodus, and even the Leviticus — of every man who 
wore the Union blue and fought the Union battle. 
The voice of caviling has been heard in places low 
and places high. It has been said that, after all, 
the great army was a mongrel assemblage of strange 
elements marvelously mixed. The debates that have 
dragged along for the past ten years bearing on the 
pension legislation of the country have brought out 
a vast deal of buncombe, and also a vast deal of 
scurrility. We have been told that the bad man 
was prevalent in the army ; that the scavenger and 



53 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

pickpocket carried muskets and drew pay; that the 
rogue was quartermaster, and the gambler lieuten- 
ant-colonel. The effort has been made to stigmatize 
the army as a whole because a draft was made to 
contribute to the ranks — to drown the fragrance of 
patriotism in the bad odors of the bounty. The old 
soldiers of the Union army are ever and anon obliged 
to listen with ill-concealed wrath to insinuations 
against the motives and character of those by whose 
side they fought the battle a quarter of a century 
ago. 

Doubtless there were bad men in the army. It 
need not be denied that the rough, the rowdy and 
the roustabout sometimes volunteered, and were 
sometimes hired to go. It would be strange indeed 
if an army of ten hundred thousand men should not 
receive a considerable contribution from the worst 
elements of society. Of a certainty, fighting is not 
a saintly business, and saints are not always required 
to do it. We may admit that many men went into 
the army through impulse, from caprice, or with the 
drift of the tide. Others went from selfish considera- 
tions, hoping for some kind of a windfall of fortune, 
and expecting to go unhurt of wounds and dangers. 
Doubtless it was not heroic for a man to be drafted 
against his will and be obliged to fight from the 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 53 

compulsion of a bayonet behind his back. All this 
may be conceded without dishonor. 

Judging from the other aspects of human society 
we should expect to find a certain percentage of 
badness in the Union army. No body of men num- 
bering a hundred or a thousand, to say nothing 
of a hundred thousand or a million, has ever 
yet been free from the weaknesses and imperfec- 
tions of the common lot. We may even select our 
assemblage from the very best fountains of society, 
and still the result is the same. If we enter the 
hall of the secret brotherhood we find the order to 
be composed of men — not angels. Appoint your 
committee of only ten, and the ancient error and 
passion of human nature at once appear. Every 
church has its schisms and quarrels, its heart-burn- 
ings and its scandals. The social club is rent by 
feuds, and must watch its officers. The society for 
the prevention of cruelty finds its secretary whipping 
his wife, and the Sunday-school treasurer has 
unexpected business in Canada. 

But these are the institutions of peace and virtue. 
They are planted in society for the special promul- 
gation and guardianship of the flowers and fruits of 
truth and hope and philanthropy. What then ? 
Shall we suppose that an army, a thousand times 



54 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

as great in its aggregate energy and activities as 
any of the local institutions of mankind in times of 
peace, organized for tlie very purpose and mission 
of violence, armed with muskets and swords and 
dragging whole parks of death-vomiting artillery at 
its heels, will be free from some of the incidental 
traces of depravity ? Shall we suppose the fighting 
man to be more sanctified than the man who plows 
or gathers pippins ? Is it reasonable that they whose 
very business it is to expose their lives to every 
species of hardship and violence, including the violence 
of death ; whose mission it is to wound and kill and 
dash down their fellow-men on the battle-field, will 
carefully observe the Ten Commandments and be- 
come the only community of saints in the world ? 
Certainly not. The expectation of such a departure 
from the common foible and sin of life is irrational 
and absurd. 

It is the truth of history that, apart from the 
common weaknesses of human character, no such 
other aggregate of men was ever seen on the earth 
as composed the Union army in the days of our 
trial and conflict. It was not composed of adven- 
turers, but of nature's picked noblemen who offered 
themselves for the ordeal and the sacrifice. The 
average intellectual and moral force of our great 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 55 

citizen soldiery was the highest ever kijown among 
the battalions that have swept the fields of war and 
conquest. The best and strongest of the young 
men of the nation were in those magnificent ranks 
of blue, A great majority of them could no more have 
been hired to leave their hopes and homes and loves 
behind, to sunder the attachments, to scatter the 
ambitions and dreams of boyhood and youth, and to 
take up m.uskets for the destruction of their fellow- 
men, than they- could have been hired to sack the 
school-house and burn the churches of their native 
villages. Ah, it was the cause that drew them forth 
from every field and hamlet and converted them 
suddenly into men of iron and destruction. They 
went into the army an unsullied host. Even in 
the pitch of battle and the license of the camp they 
kept their hearts void of offense towards man and 
God. And whoever to-day assails their characters, 
attempts to mar the glory of their work and record, 
or even casts an inuendo against the purity and 
nobility of their motives, is the one prodigious and 
infamous scandalmonger and slanderer of human 
history. 

These things are true not only of the men who 
fought to defend and save the Union, but of those 
who fought to destroy it. We may not overlook 



56 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

the great fact that the Confederate army also was 
a citizen soldiery. The Boys in Gray left their 
homes, cast their prospects away and gave them- 
selves to what they supposed to be the cause of 
their country. The Confederate army, like our 
own, rose from the earth when the tocsin was 
sounded, and went forth to battle with the same 
motives and same heroic devotion as did the Boys 
in Blue. It will not do to disparage that great 
Southern army. It was composed of as brave men 
as ever bared their breasts to the thunder-blast of 
battle. I can not, even after a quarter of a century, 
re-read the story of those tremendous conflicts — 
of Malvern Hill, of Chantilly, of Antietam, of Fred- 
ericksburg, of Gettysburg, of Shiloh, of Chickamauga, 
of Mission Ridge, of the Wilderness — without hearing 
again the roar of the awful struggle, without seeing 
the earth converted in chaos and the heavens filled 
with sulphurous smoke, without feeling again the 
throb and rush and wild passion of the scene, with- 
out hot tears in the eye and fire in the heart, without 
recognizing — I had almost said applauding — the terri- 
ble charges and wild yells of those Men in Gray 
as they renewed the hopeless battle and swept over 
hillcrest and chasm on their way to a heroic death 
for the sake of their Sunny South. It were a shame 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 57 

at this late day to fail to recognize the valor and 
fidelity of that great host which rose at the call of 
the Southern leaders and went to its fatal end in the 
bloody ditches which marked the limits and fmale 
of the conflict. 

While we thus praise our foe, while we commend 
the heroism and devotion of the Southern army, 
while we honor with this distant eulogium the 
splendid battle which the Confederate soldiers fought, 
we may not forget or omit to emphasize the essen- 
tial badness of the Southern cause. It is here that 
the whole difference lies between the work of the 
Union soldier and that of the Confederate. It was 
not that the one was braver than the other. It was 
not that the one was more than the other inflamed 
with patriotism ; though it is true that the patriotism 
of the Northern soldier was of a larger significance 
and truer measure than the merely local love of 
country by which the man of the South was fired 
to battle. The one fought for the whole nation, for 
the Union as such, for the Government which our 
fathers founded and transmitted to their descendants, 
for the American name and fame in the widest sense ; 
while the other fought for the State in which he was 
born, or at most for that section of the United States 
to which his own was bound by common ties. 



58 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

It is therefore in the two causes for which the 
combatants went to battle that we must seek the 
real ground of divergence and the true reasons of 
superiority. Nor is there any uncertainty as to this 
matter of the relative place to be assigned to the 
Union cause and that of the South. The question 
has gone to the bar of history. The judgment of 
mankind has been passed upon it, and a decision has 
been rendered in that court from which there is no 
appeal. The South has made a great mistake in 
calling her cause the **Lost Cause;" as though any 
cause could be lost that had in it the principle of 
virtue and eternal truth ! To say that a cause is 
lost is to acknowledge that it is a bad cause, or else 
to intimate that the world is a world of chance ; that 
there is neither order in the earth below nor a 
throne of righteousness in the heavens. Doubtless 
they who have coined and perpetuated this phrase 
have thought to evoke the sympathy of mankind for 
that great enterprise which the Southern leaders 
projected and which carried them down in the tre- 
mendous wreck of 1865. But the Lost Cause is not 
a phrase with which to conjure. That cause was 
one of the worst for which men ever went to battle. 
In almost every other attempted revolution which 
has been undertaken in modern times the leaders 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 59 

have challenged the good opinion of the world by 
formulating some kind of document in which their 
grievances and motives of conduct were set forth 
to be read and pondered by all mankind. Thus did 
our fathers in the summer of our Independence. 
Were the rebels of '76, who rose against the Mother 
Country, afraid or unable to tell the reasons of their 
rebellion, to proclaim them on the housetops and to 
cry them with endless vociferation and bonfire in 
every village of the land ? Nay, nay ; they gloried 
in it. They drew up a true bill with astounding 
particulars and challenged not only the people but 
the kings of every nation under the sun to read their 
Declaration of Independence. 

But what did the Southern leaders do ? They 
organized a rebellion. They fired the Southern 
heart. They pulled down the Stars and Stripes and 
trampled that sacred emblem in the dust. They 
rent the Union asunder — tore their States out of the 
Union's side as a tiger might tear out the vitals of 
a victim. And for what ? It is an astounding fact 
in the history of our times that to this day the world 
is waiting for that Southern Declaration of Indepen- 
dence. No man of them all, no number of men among 
thern, had the courage to undertake the preparation 
of a document in which their so-called *' cause " 



60 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

should be set forth for the admiration of mankind. 
The fact is that they had no cause but the cause 
of Negro bondage. They had no reason for going to 
war except the bad reason couched in the determina- 
tion to hold the African race in slavery. It was the 
reason of the rice-swamp and the cotton-field. It 
was the reason of the auction-block. It was the 
reason of avarice and that haughty spirit of domina- 
tion which had been engendered by a century of 
traffic in human life. It was a cause for which, with 
sobered intelligence, the aged heroes of the exploded 
Confederacy are compelled by the very logic of 
events, by the unchangeable verdict of history, and 
by the immutable judgment of mankind, to blush 
and turn their faces to the wall. This is the one 
great shame of their situation — that their cause was 
infamous. To be sure it is not the business of any 
patriot to taunt and harry the old Southern leaders 
with their fatal and criminal mistake in making war 
on the Union of our fathers. But the case is made 
up ; the verdict is rendered, and the documents, 
under an unchangeable seal, have been handed over 
to posterity. I hold in honor the Confederate soldiers 
for their valor in the field, and I honor them still 
more that they have rekindled the fires of ancient 
devotion on the altars of the Southland ; that even 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 61 

in their old age tlieir swords are ready to leap from 
their scabbards at the slightest insult done to that 
magnificent Union which they once fought to destroy. 
I rejoice that by degrees they have recovered from 
the wild insanity and fierce passions of that bloody 
war. But I say that the fundamental reason and 
principle which bore them into that war were as far 
from the fundamental reason and principle which 
moved the Union soldiers as night is from day, as 
earth is from heaven. 

I say it ever and say it strong-. 

In that awful and bloody fight, 
The cause of the South was eternally wrong; 

And the Union eternally right, 

It was, then, the mission and destiny of our great 
citizen soldier army to strike at and destroy the cause 
on which the Southern Confederacy rested. It was 
the portent and menace of such a cause in the United 
States that had in the first place called forth the 
Union soldiers ; and its destruction was the one end 
and aim for which they fought. 1 believe that more 
and more, with the progress of the war, the true 
concept of the issue was obtained by the combatants. 
At the first the anger of the Union army flamed high 
against the Confederates. The patriotic wrath of the 
North, failing to apprehend precisely the nature of 



62 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

the struggle, burned hot against the men who were 
the agents and representatives of the Southern cause. 
At the beginning the endeavor was rather to kill the 
Confederates as rebels and traitors, to sweep them 
from the face of the earth, than to annihilate the 
bad cause for which they had taken up arms against 
the Union. In the last year of the war, though the 
battles were as fierce as ever, though the determina- 
tion of the Union soldiers to conquer or die became 
more fixed even than at the beginning of the conflict, 
the men who wore the blue came to look at the 
enemy in a different light. Intercourse sprang up 
along the lines ; and it was easy to see, when the 
armistice was on, that the Men in Blue and the Men 
in Gray were after all but brethren estranged and 
belligerent. At the same time the Union soldier had 
come to see more clearly that it was a principle rather 
than a man that was to be destroyed. Doubtless 
the Southern mind also cleared as the contest drew 
near its end. Slavery was now hopelessly destroyed. 
That horrid nightmare had been broken forever ; 
and only a few remained who desired that the 
incubus should again sit on the breast of the South. 
Many Southern leaders have in recent years declared 
that after the summer of '63, though the Confederates 
still fought well, even with a desperation of resist. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 63 

ance for which it is hard to find a parallel in history, 
they nevertheless had lost the vehemence and fury 
of assault with which they began the war. 

However these principles of action may be deter- 
mined, it is certain that the true work of our Union 
soldiery was to purge this Nation of the curse of 
slavery, to make the Nation free, to institute by force 
a new era common to all the land, in which men might 
go everywhere with free speech as their right and free 
labor as their inheritance. This was enough. Free 
speech being granted, the time had come when slavery 
could no more exist in an enlightened nation than a 
moth can survive in the flames of a torch. The flag of 
the Republic had to be reinterpreted in its significance 
as well as lifted to its place again on every spire and 
temple within the borders of the Republic. American 
institutions had all to be explained in a new language 
by the agency of the sword. The jargon of political 
liberty had to give place to the reality. The Constitu- 
tion of the United States had to be made consistent 
with the Declaration of Independence. For, know all 
men now and evermore that the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and not the Constitution of our country, is 
the true guide by which this new Nation so gloriously 
established by our fathers is to sail as with a chart 
and compass through the stormy seas. 



64 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

From this point of view it is not diificult to perceive 
what should be the rational and patriotic attitude of 
the old soldiers of the Union towards their former foe. 
There is no reason why the men of the South should 
longer be held as enemies, unless in some particular 
instances they persist in hugging that old a-nd miser- 
able relic of barbarism which was blown from the 
cannon's mouth on the slopes of Gettysburgh and the 
banks of the Rappahannock. That the men of the 
South arose at the call of those who had been their 
trusted leaders ; that, impelled by the forces of their 
birth and education, they took up arms; that, mad- 
dened by conditions which they could not understand, 
they rushed into a wicked war with the Union which 
made us one people, — were things natural, and per- 
haps inevitable, under the circumstances which had 
been inherited from an evil past. Perhaps not one 
man in a hundred of those who fought in the cause of 
the Confederacy sufficiently apprehended the nature 
of the thing he did to be held morally responsible 
by posterity. But after the fact, when the light of 
day has been turned in a flood upon the whole field of 
our national controversy, and when he who runs may 
read the unchangeable verdict of history with respect 
to the true nature of the conflict, whoever persists in 
hugging that ancient and delusive sin to his bossom is 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 65 

a criminal, and deserves the ostracism and hatred of 
mankind. The generation of men who were reared 
under the shadow of slavery, who were prejudiced 
and poisoned from their mother's breast with the 
malign influences of that pernicious institution, could 
not see the true conditions under which they lived, 
and can hardly be blamed for their blindness. It was 
only when the pall had been cut by the sword and 
when the light streamed through, illumining the land- 
scape and revealing to the senses and consciences of 
men the criminal condition of our political society, that 
responsibility came, bringing to every man the alterna- 
tive of choosing righteousness or sin. It is the part of 
the citizen soldiery still remaining in the land which 
their valor saved and redeemed from the blight of 
bondage to affiliate sincerely and loyally with all men. 
North and South, who are in love with free institutions 
and who uphold with heartiness and good will the 
doctrines of the Declaration of Independence. 

We have now arrived at a point in the present 
review of our citizen soldier from which his duties in 
peace, as well as in war, may be deduced. One of 
the first of these was — and is — undoubtedly to cease 
to fight when the fight is done. The practice of war- 
fare quickly engenders a habit which is hard to break. 
Men are generally thrown into the army in their 



66 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

youth, at that particular time of life when the mind 
with all its intellections, its emotions, and passions, 
passes rapidly from the mercurial freedom of boyhood 
into the fixidness of permanent character. The 
young man who for three or four years about the 
time of his majority is tossed into the indescribable 
excitements of bivouac and battle can not with ease 
regain his equilibrium and resume the tame pursuits 
of peace. This was the trial and hardship through 
which the great majority of the Union soldiers passed 
at the close of the Civil War. To their everlasting 
honor be it said that they quietly laid down their 
arms and returned to their homes like men who were 
coming again from a toilsome and dangerous journey 
into a foreign land. 

But another and still higher duty of the citizen 
soldier in time of peace is to protect and defend by the 
agencies of civil society the same principles for which 
he fought when they were endangered by the vio- 
lence of the enemy in the field. It was not enough 
that the men of the Union army beat down slavery 
and secession by the violence of war and then 
returned to their homes and country as though their 
work were accomplished. We all remember how the 
principles involved in the great struggle with the 
Southern Confederacy were put on trial before the 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 67 

Government and people after the war had closed. 
The question of the Union, of the reconstruction of 
the Union, of the restoration of National authority, 
of the reestablishment of the autonomy of all the 
States under the central Government of the Nation, 
was taken up by Congress; and for years together 
we journeyed on through seemingly endless discus- 
sion in the hope of finding the rational ground of 
settlement and peace. The question of the Black 
Man in particular, of his status before the law, of his 
rights as an American citizen, of everything that con- 
cerned him and his welfare, arose to trouble the mind 
and conscience of the American people ; and to this 
day no clear and adequate concept has been obtained 
with respect to the African race, its present status 
and its future hope. These questions the citizen 
soldier inherited after the war, in common with the 
civilian ; and the one, as much as the other, was 
bound to give heed and thought and effort to the 
issues thrust upon him, and to the solution of the 
difficulties which confronted the people. It v/ould 
have been, and still will be, and is, the height of folly, 
the most illogical of all actions, for the citizen soldier, 
coming home victorious from his battle with slavery 
and with the Confederacy which was built upon it, tp 
abandon or neglect any of the principles for which he 



68 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

contended in the field. Now it is that the ballot-box 
is substituted for the musket, the public press for the 
ordnance train, the debating club for the commissary, 
and the election for the blast of battle. Is not the 
man who fought one way and votes another the most 
prodigious fool in the world ? Why should a soldier 
expose his life to the hazard of war, face the enemy's 
batteries, charge through the leaden hail of twenty 
battle-fields, and come home with scars and diseases 
bearing everlasting witness to the hardships through 
which he has passed, only to turn about in his 
relations and renounce in his civil action the very 
principles for which he contended in the field ? And 
is not the citizen soldier more than any other man 
in all the world under obligation to see the battle 
through, to continue the contest until the victory is 
absolute and the principles of truth, of justice, of 
eternal righteousness written with an iron pen and 
lead in the rock forever ? 

Let no soldier of that great Union army, therefore, 
suppose for a moment that he is discharged. Never 
until the comrade lifts the bugle in the gloaming of 
the evening and for the last time sounds *'taps" at 
the brink of the soldier's grave can he be discharged 
from his everlasting guardianship of those principles 
of truth and right for which he exposed his life in 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 69 

the war for the Union. The soldier knows how 
much the Union is worth. He knows what freedom 
cost. He knows at how great a sacrifice this Nation 
was redeemed and purged from its sin and shame. 
And he also knows that eternal vigilance in civil life, 
as v/ell as in the life of warfare, is the price of that 
blessed freedom which his sword so gloriously won 
in the contest with the enemy. 

Still another duty of the citizen soldier remains 
to be considered. He and the patriot civilian who 
was detained from the field, but who nevertheless 
had his heart, his soul, and his substance in the 
conflict — who with his sympathies upheld the flag 
and fought the battle at home while his brothers 
contended in the field — must be at one in all things, 
just as though they had been comrades in the camp. 
There has been a danger at this point in American 
society. It is a danger which has existed in all 
countries in similar conditions — the peril that a gap, 
a chasm, perchance an abyss, may open between the 
returned soldiers who have fought a successful war. 
and the citizens among whom they are distributed. 
For a while after the battle the soldier will of course 
be applauded for his heroic deeds ; but by and by 
the civil citizenship wearies somewhat of its applause. 
The shout is less loud and less prolonged than it was 



70 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

in the day of victory. Meanwhile the returning sol- 
dier, glad to recover his home sound in body and 
with victory on his crest, fraternizes with the civilian 
whom he left behind. At length, however, he fmds 
his old comrade ; and they two begin to sit apart. 
Presently they look askance at the man who did not 
join them in battle. The question of honors and 
emoluments arises, and the soldier competes with the 
citizen, the citizen with the soldier. The latter 
expects the aid of his comrades, and the former says 
that the soldier after all fought not for the cause, 
but for the loaves and fishes. The breach thus 
started widens. It gapes ; and ere long the two 
classes, the soldiery and the citizenship, stand on 
opposite banks, all sympathy gone between them, 
watching each other's movements with distrust and 
jealousy. 

Our own country has been happily spared the 
recurrence of this phenomenon in the civil and sol- 
dier life of the Nation. Never before did any soldiery 
subside so completely into its former relations and 
conditions as did our great Union army. But there 
have appeared at times symptoms of a class division 
between the old men of the war and the old men of 
civil life. They who opposed the war and had no 
sympathy with it have observed these manifesta- 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 71 

tions of a possible break between the soldier and 
the citizen, and have rejoiced at the inauspicious 
sign. The Republic is to be congratulated that as 
yet no really dangerous rupture has anywhere 
occurred between the soldiers as a class and the civil 
population of which they constitute so honorable a 
part. It is the duty of the soldier to be on his guard 
against any and every condition and tendency which 
may threaten to place him in antagonism with his 
civilian neighbor. 

The organization, now so widely extended and so 
powerful, of the old Men in Blue into the Grand Army 
of the Republic, was a movement altogether warranted 
by the circumstances, and natural to the situation. It 
was almost necessary that the surviving veterans of 
our war for the Union should in their after years seek 
the companionship and support which such a society 
affords. But even this great and honorable organiza- 
tion has its dangers. Some are dangers from within 
and others from without. There is a possibility of a 
soldier clannishness to the extent of making our out- 
side citizenship distrustful of the order, composed 
though it is of the men who saved the Union. There 
is also a possibility that the veterans thus associated 
may doubt the fidelity of the civil citizenship with 
which they are surrounded. None of these things 



72 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

must be. Confidence, affection, mutual esteem and 
honor are the conditions which must continue to 
prevail between the veterans of the war for the Union 
and the patriotic people who have never borne arms. 
The citizen must continue to remember the soldier, to 
revive the tradition of his glorious work in the times 
of our National peril, to defer to all the righteous and 
well-founded claims which the soldier may have for 
the emoluments of office and the other benefits and 
distinctions conferred by society. Doubtless, the 
civilian is not expected to yield up his own ambitions, 
to deny his own capacities, to retire from sight and 
hide a diminished head in the presence of the Union 
veteran. Such a course would be ignoble, humiliating. 
All that is expected is that the citizen without a 
military record shall show a generous deference to the 
men who wore the blue. 

On the other hand, it is the duty of the old citizen 
soldier to remember that his were not the only sacri- 
fices and hardships that fell to the lot of the patriot 
in the trying crisis of the civil war. Too much honor 
can not be conceded to the men who remained behind 
and bore the burden of civil life while the Union army 
was doing its noble work in the field. It must be 
remembered that the men at home were also devoted 
patriots. Many of them were too old for the service. 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 73 

Recollection is busy when these things are mentioned. 
Hundreds of aged men volunteered who had passed 
the epoch of strength, and were remanded to their 
homes by the mustering officers of the Government. 
It will not do to forget that .in the breasts of such the 
fires of battle were aglow as much as in the hearts of 
the young and strong who took their muskets, sprang 
into line and marched away. The passion for the 
service was so great that aged men went into barber- 
shops and had their white hair colored brown and their 
venerable beards cut away, that by such patriotic 
deception, they might seem young again and be 
admitted to the ranks. Boys also struggled forward, 
and offered themselves at a time of life when nature 
could have by no means borne the weight of the 
service. Cripples were constrained to remain at home 
and fret about their yards with unsteady step. Those 
to whom nature had denied the gift of strength were 
left behind to sigh for the freedom of the march, the 
camp, the expedition, and for the wild excitements of 
battle. All these cheerfully gave themselves to such 
work as remained to be done at home. There were 
wives and mothers, and children in fatherless groups 
to be clothed and fed and warmed. There were a 
thousand sacrifices and hardships, means to be 
expended, farms to be mortgaged, homes to be 



74 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

encumbered or lost, resources to be consumed, and 
life itself to be worn away in patriotic devotion to such 
duties as the home service required of our patriotic 
people during the continuance of the war. 

These things must by no means be forgotten. 
The soldiers must remember the steadfastness of the 
friends whom they left behind them. They must 
remember the loving messages which they had from 
loved ones on the field and in the hospital. They 
must recollect the boxes of provisions, the bundles 
of clothing, and the tokens of affection from father 
and mother at home, from sister and brother, from 
uncle and aunt, from the sweetheart who might 
presently be doomed to that indescribable widowhood 
into which ten thousand girls were plunged by the 
sudden eclipse of battle. If the Boys in Blue who 
took their muskets — with their lives — in their hands 
and put themselves between our American institu- 
tions and the enemy deserved, and still deserve, all 
things at the hands of the civil citizens of the United 
States, so in like manner that citizenship, patriotic 
and devoted to the soldier's cause both then and 
now, deserved, and still deserves, all things at the 
hands of the Union soldiers. The cause was a 
common cause, which some defended in the field and 
others maintained at home until what time the 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 75 

victory was won, the flag restored to its place, the 
curse of slavery extinguished, the secession enter- 
prise buried in oblivion, and the Union reestablished 
on the immutable foundation of righteousness. All 
who upheld and promoted that cause are entitled 
to mutual respect ; and it is the duty of our citizen 
soldiery to concede the equal award of patriotism 
to their fellow-citizens in civil life. 

Many things else crowd for utterance respecting 
the duties and work of the citizen soldier in these 
our times of peace. He is expected to instill into the 
minds of his children and his children's children the 
lessons of patriotism, of devotion, and of self-sacrifice. 
He is expected, in his life and character, to stand as 
the exemplar of all the nobler virtues by which the 
American people are redeemed and glorified in the 
eyes of the nations. He is expected to keep afive 
in his own breast the fires of his early love of liberty, 
and see to it that the sunset of his days is not 
clouded and obscured with pessimistic views of his 
country and his country's future. He is expected 
to exemplify in the last days of his earthly career 
the heroic dignity which belongs in all ages to the 
veteran soldier. He is expected, as the final ordeal 
of his life approaches, to face that enemy, whose 
shadowy sword no mortal life can escape, with the 



76 THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 

courage and valor which he exhibited in the days 
of his youth on the field of battle. He is expected 
to transmit to posterity an untarnished memory, 
hallowed by every ennobling circumstance which 
belongs to the life and work of the first men of the 
nineteenth century. He is expected to take his 
place in the shining ranks of the great and good 
whose deeds are commemorated and whose actions 
and names are made immortal in the ineffaceable 
records of human history. 

Men and veterans of the Union army ! The 
shadows lengthen. Your activity and strength are 
not so great as in the day when with fixed bayonets 
and flashing eyes you charged the vomiting batteries 
of the enemy. You are no longer young men. 
Already your ranks are thinned by the sword of the 
Destroyer. Many have gone to sleep in the valley, 
and many more totter in the last days of their earthly 
pilgrimage. The glow of the evening twilight is 
already around your camp. The sentries are already 
set for the night-watch which is soon to be called. 
The almond tree flourishes, and they that look out 
of the windows are darkened. Ere long the pitcher 
will be broken at the fountain and the wheel at the 
cistern cease to turn. Each succeeding year is trans- 
ferring large numbers from your honored ranks to 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 77 

those other shadowy but shining ranks on high. 
Flesh and heart are failing, and the day is not so 
very far distant when for the last man of the Union 
host the shutters shall be closed and the mourners 
shall go about the streets. 

As yet the day of the final extinction of that great 
army from the earth is for a while procrastinated. We 
may still meet and recount the battle. Many a song 
and jest .and story may yet be sung or told by the 
rekindled camp fires of the veterans whose valiant 
arms won for us the fight in the battle which Freedom 
fought with the Dragon. Though the head is growing 
old, the heart of the soldier still glows with the fervor 
of perpetual youth. Though the annual roll-call is 
ever diminished, though gaps appear in the column to 
right and left, though well-remembered faces are seen 
no more on the anniversary day, though the green 
mounds, hallowed with flowers, bedewed with tears, 
and blessed with sacred memories, are ever multi- 
plied, yet the remaining veterans close ranks, and 
with steady step march forward for the remaining 
battle of life. The blessings of earth and of Heaven 
be upon both the living and the dead ! Sweet be 
the sunshine that lights, and soft the showers of 
summer rain that caress the graves of all our Union 
dead ! May the whitening locks of our surviving com- 



78 



THE CITIZEN SOLDIER. 



rades who still uphold the honor of the flag for which 
they contended so valorously in the day of battle be 
crowned with a crown surpassing the splendor of all 
kingly diadems, and the soul of every veteran of the 
Grand Army of the Republic be filled with the radi- 
ance of his country's smile, the warmth of the 
Nation's undying love, and the fullness of eternal 
peace! 




